Newest piece at National Review: "The Shaky Case against the Death Penalty"

Not surprisingly, the Sunday-morning talk shows focused on whether we should keep the death penalty. ABC News’s This Week was hardly a balanced panel, with four members wanting to abolish the death penalty and the fifth wanting “maybe a halfway point between eliminating it” and what we currently have.

Let’s analyze the three main arguments made on ABC against the death penalty.

Has support for the death penalty fallen since 1994? Sure, but what ABC News didn’t explain was that the years chosen were carefully cherry-picked. Support for the death penalty in 1994 was the highest ever recorded, according to Gallup. But consider instead all the 43 surveys from 1936 to 2012. Those surveys showed that an average of 63.8 percent of Americans supported the death penalty. Sixty percent in 2013 is down slightly from the average over the preceding 76 years, but it was hardly an earth-shattering change. . . .

1 Comments:

It is not about revenge, nor is it a "penalty". A "penalty" is something which is supposed to teach that bad behavior has its consequences - a moot point if the person is no longer living.

The legal execution of a person is simply the logical consequence of the decision that the person can never again be allowed to roam freely in a society which depends on mutual trust for its stability.

The alternative - life in prison - is illogical because, again, prisons are supposed to be places which provide the lesson that bad actions have unpleasant consequences, which lessons, when learned, allow the person to return to society.

If the heinousness of the crime creates the decision that the person can never return to society, then prison is illogical.